


Somebody's Son

by Rosage



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Black Eagles Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Trans Hubert von Vestra, warnings and notes inside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27658634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosage/pseuds/Rosage
Summary: With his shadow war near its end and his marriage to Ferdinand close at hand, Hubert learns the father he killed may have been an imposter, sending him spiraling backward.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg & Hubert von Vestra, Ferdinand von Aegir/Hubert von Vestra, Hubert von Vestra & Hanneman von Essar
Comments: 8
Kudos: 77





	Somebody's Son

**Author's Note:**

> This touches on heavier subjects than my usual, including past child abuse/past parental abuse, patricide, on-screen murder, repressed trauma, mental health, and self-isolation.
> 
> Hubert is a trans man, and there are references to his dysphoria and physical transition, including surgery and needles.

Hubert stalks around the operating table. Its presence makes him tighten the magic around his target, who squirms in the corner, the only other person left in the small hideout. He kicks aside the mask that fell after his last attack. They could not hide from him forever. None of them can.

The room’s power source glows bright green in the dark, shining on the Argarthan’s face as they morph. The features resemble Hubert’s, but older, and even gaunter. Hubert laughs.  
  
“I killed the man with relish, and you think this will save you?”

The Agarthan imitates his cackle. “Killed him? You never noticed?”  
  
“Noticed?” He wants to strangle himself for letting the question slip, enabling a smile to spread across that all-too-familiar face.

“You Vestras think you can take our place in the shadows, when you can’t even detect a rat in your own home.”

Hubert grabs the Agarthan’s robes and slams them against the wall. “Talk. Now.”

His voice is hoarse, his grip shaky from his expended spells. A foolish time to be so aggressive, to get so close. The Agarthan notices. Green light flashes on the blade they draw from their robes.

Hubert plants a hand over his father’s forehead and summons his last bit of dark magic. It squeezes through his fingers as if emptying his veins, but his lips curl. A long-held fantasy, far cruder than how he disposed of the real deal.  
  
Because it must have been the real deal. He himself saw his father’s face turn purple, collapsing into his coffee as so many of his own victims had. Hubert built up his immunity to the poison for a year in preparation. To get away with it in the Vestra estate, of all places, while sitting primly across the table…

After which he’d delighted in disintegrating the body, erasing every trace of evidence, as he’d been taught. Too quickly for it to release the tar many Agarthans have splattered on Hubert’s boots.

A faint blinking pulls him from his thoughts. He curses when he recognizes the contraption his final target must have activated. The whole base will be shrapnel any second, along with any evidence his team didn’t take with them. He warps away without further investigation.

* * *

The ministers’ main chamber is already candlelit when Hubert returns to the palace. He reaches for his dagger before a bright voice upends him.

“Hubert! You are home earlier than expected.”

Ferdinand is tucked into the loveseat, holding a book and teacup. His neat robe and fuzzy slippers mock Hubert’s stained clothes. Of course he waited up for him on this of all nights. As if what Hubert needs after such a mission is a tea party, not to find Ferdinand safe in bed, breathing steadily.

 _A rat in your own home_. Hubert’s already perilous heart rate spikes. “State our role.”

“To guide her.” Ferdinand’s smile drops as he closes his book. “Are you—”

“Go to bed.”

Not trusting his voice for anything else, Hubert goes to bathe. His training keeps him from slamming the door. It was his father who put a stop to such tantrums, back when Hubert grew tall enough to reach the knob. One useful gift. The click of the lock feeds him a crumb of security.

“Hubert?” Ferdinand calls softly from outside. “Are you injured? Do you need anything?”

Hubert grits his teeth. “I thought I made myself clear.”

“You are trailing blood.”

Assuring Ferdinand that it isn’t his, that he’ll clean it up himself, shakes off his fiancé. He lights a lantern and investigates every corner for an intruder. Finding nothing, he draws a bath and shucks off his clothing. Knives clatter to the floor until the evening sucks at every inch of his skin. He almost uses Ferdinand’s absurd bubbles, just to conceal the sight of himself. Instead, he extinguishes the lantern and sinks into the water, scrubbing and scrubbing, until he imagines the world turns a greyish maroon.

It has been a while since his body bothered him so. He took pride in shaping himself, in the scars on his chest, so much more uniform than those that mark his mistakes. He even stole his father’s resources to deliver to the healers, the aspect that made him smuggest. But if his father was left in some ditch before Hubert even declared who he was…

Has he ever truly been somebody’s son?

(His father could be out there, alive, laying low—but no. No imposter who spent that long wearing a Vestra’s skin would leave such a loose end.)

He puts on a robe and exits. The filth he trailed inside has been cleaned up, and faint light emits from under the bedroom door. _Honestly_. Whether he should get annoyed or laugh, he’s too much of a shriveled husk for either. He does everything needed to follow up on the mission before finally retiring.

Ferdinand has shifted his post to their bed, the tea gone and the same book in his hands. Turning a page he may or may not have read, he glances unsubtly at Hubert, who relents and joins him. Ferdinand reaches for the hand that Hubert clamped over his father’s face. It is still unsteady, now wrinkled from the bath. Ferdinand rubs it with a thumb.

“You seem especially tense tonight.”

“Perhaps.” Hubert holds back a number of retorts. Though Ferdinand knows better than to ask about Hubert’s excursions, he won’t give up his own mission to tease out whatever he can from Hubert’s grimaces or stumbling gait, and apply whatever he deems necessary to fix it. Like there’s any fix for this.

Hubert hates when there’s no fix.

The cool metal of Ferdinand’s ring rubs against his knuckles. Ferdinand plans to join House Vestra; his own letters have lacked any family seal for some time. Recently, during mornings at the tea table and evenings in front of the fire, Hubert has almost regretted his conviction to wait until after the shadow war. To wait until Ferdinand is less likely to be widowed with no notice or explanation. To wait until Hubert might even join him for bed at a normal time, as an almost normal husband.

The idea now of gifting him Vestra, like a ring box full of maggots…

“What do you remember of my father?” Hubert asks.

“Your father?” Ferdinand tilts his head. “I believe I found him intimidating. Though I could find no fault with his manners, he was always skulking about, silently passing judgment. I rarely approached him. Mostly, I remember the day…” Trailing off, he puts aside his book.

“What day?”

“I was in the stables at my family estate, avoiding some lesson I deemed less interesting. So not even adolescence, most likely.” Ferdinand shakes his head, a little smile on his lips, and Hubert forces himself to wait. “You ducked inside, to the surprise of my mare and I. However you came to be there, you were soaked in sweat, like you had run all the way from the palace.”

“Is this going somewhere, besides me being pitiful?”

“Well, that is the thing. I only remember because you seemed so frightened. I had never seen you like that. But you asked me…” Ferdinand presses his temple. “Ah, you wanted to know if my father was behaving strangely. So I suppose this was not about your father after all, apologies.”

Hubert has gone cold in a way not even Ferdinand can ward off. “What happened next?”

“When I asked if something was wrong with your father, you snapped at me and ran off. Oh, right, nobody was supposed to know you were there.” Ferdinand goes quiet. “You did not usually snap at me, either.”

That, of all things, saps the last of Hubert’s strength. He pulls his hand free to rest his head in it. Ferdinand rubs his back in broad strokes, then pinches the muscles below his neck. A sigh leaks from him.

“I do not know what happened,” Ferdinand says, intolerably soft, “but if it goes back that far, then you must have been a child. Surely you are not to blame.”

Not to blame for allowing an intruder in his home? If he had noticed, perhaps Edelgard would never have been taken. If this is true (it isn’t true), he is to blame for _all_ of it, every night his lady tosses and turns, every step she took down a bloody path.

“I was old enough to be assigned to Lady Edelgard,” he says.

“Then you were too young for that, too!”

Hubert yanks himself away from Ferdinand’s ministrations. “Excuse me? You think me incompetent? Should I have frolicked for another decade while atrocities transpired under my nose?”

“Yes, well, some of us were never informed to do otherwise.”

“And here I thought you took pride in your autonomy, Aegir.”

Ferdinand winces, and something within Hubert cracks apart.

His father never shouted. He would tuck his arms behind his back and lift his chin, piercing his target with the chartreuse that Hubert tries to hide. Then, ever so quietly, he would select the sharpest words to slide between one’s ribs.

Although… At some point, his verbal blades became dull, poisoned with implications that would sink in later, rather than reduce one to a puddle at his feet. In between, there were days when he raised his voice, and Hubert had no idea what he’d done to spark the change.

And then he had run to Ferdinand.

He hauls his legs over the bedside. “I must spend the night at my estate. Don’t wait for me.”

He leaves before he can see if that is the true knife in Ferdinand’s ribs.

* * *

Shortly after arriving at his estate, Hubert drops his weary body into a chair he would never have subjected Edelgard to. He peeks out of the dark, heavy curtain. It would hide his silhouette from anyone outside, but there’s no movement in the yard. He closes the curtain. Ferdinand tugged on it with dismay during the tour Hubert gave him, which covered little more than a guest would have seen, beyond warnings about the traps. They did not even enter the bedrooms.

 _He_ does not even enter the bedrooms.

For lack of a better place to start, he opens the nearest drawer and rifles through the files therein. A snake won’t get to his head without evidence. If that Agarthan was only passing the blame on his father’s treachery, he will find some way to resurrect them merely to kill them again.

Two cups of coffee later, he has searched through everything from financial documents to personal effects he neglected to burn. None of it is conclusive. As Hanneman told him, his father’s politics reversed during the Insurrection of the Seven, but a number of nobles fell prey to bribes or threats.

A Vestra is supposed to be above both. To put their emperor before all. Hubert reheats the pot of coffee and boils along with it. He doesn’t drink it before passing out on the couch.

In the dark, Edelgard wrestles to escape the hand pulling her brown hair. The hand morphs, leeching of all color. A young Hubert tries to lunge, cast a spell, do _anything_. The distance never closes. His screams die in the space between.

“You told me to protect her with my life. You told me. You told me—”

The Agarthan from before wears his father’s face, and laughs with Hubert’s voice. The room twists. He looks down to find his own hand tugging at Edelgard’s scalp.

He wakes, reaching for a body that’s not there. _Edelgard_. No, she should be in her own bed. His spouse is the one missing. Wait—not his spouse, yet, and not missing.

It takes a dossier’s worth of facts to orient himself.

On the mornings he woke to find his father in such a state, he was not to approach him. He tried, once, when he was small and thought his father dead. His punishment came after his father was well enough.

_I thought I made myself clear._

The night’s coffee churns in Hubert’s stomach. Who is he molded after? He, who deigns to stand beside his lady, to share Ferdinand’s bed?

He sends orders to Edelgard and Ferdinand’s guards, brews another pot of coffee, and returns every last file to its place. Only then does he dig out one of the needles he stole from Edelgard’s enemies, capable of injecting his medicine beneath his skin without assistance. Even that cannot make him feel like himself. It recalls his school days, when the treatment turned him as oily as the schoolchildren around him—until he killed his father (killed _someone_ ) and sheared off his curtain of hair.

If only he were still in charge of assisting Edelgard in the morning. Half of his spiraling must be because she is not whole in front of him, grounding him with her orders, or even a barb over breakfast.

He is not fit to return. Not as a blade dull enough to fail her. Instead, he makes preparations for a visit.

* * *

After Hanneman’s aid during the war, Edelgard gifted him the little house near the Imperial libraries. He keeps a tidy home, as orderly and practical as the Vestra estate, but half as austere. The quaint white curtains would earn Ferdinand’s approval, though strange devices interrupt the décor. Hubert sits in an armchair and pretends to drink a too-sweet cup of tea.

“I never thought I’d see the day you came to me about your father,” Hanneman says with a chuckle. Hubert’s irritation can only mean this is the genuine article. But no—it’s folly to make assumptions.

“Before we get to that, can you please remind me about the last book you lent me?”

Partway through Hanneman’s explanation of _Crestologists and Dark Magic: A Match Made in Hades_ , Hubert cuts him off.

“You and my father worked closely together. I require a full description of what he was like at the time,” Hubert says.

Hanneman sips his tea and looks out the window at his little herb garden. “I am afraid that is a broad request. Why, I could write an essay alone on his approach to spellcraft, to say nothing of his appreciation for…”

This is why Hubert avoided him at the academy. Once, he accepted Hanneman’s invitation to go fishing, intending to interrogate him about Tomas. He found himself on the receiving end of a far clumsier interrogation, along with Hanneman’s ramblings. It was so nostalgic that Hubert hadn’t bothered again.

“The facts, only, please. You are a researcher. There is no need for reverie,” Hubert says.

Thankfully, that is direction Hanneman understands well. Unfortunately, many of the details are things Hubert wouldn’t have known, or was too young to recall. His father’s methodology when experimenting; his opinions of his colleagues, often negative toward his eventual co-conspirators; and his taste in food, of which Hubert thought he had no preferences.

For efficiency’s sake, Hubert asks questions about what he does remember. At an innocuous reference, Hanneman adjusts his spectacles and leans forward, as focused as he gets on diagrams of rare Crests.

“My boy, did he hurt you?”

Hubert swallows the tea without thinking, lodging molten sugar in his throat. He manages to remain unemotional, to prevent his voice from losing the deep, smooth register that took so long to obtain.

“Quite irrelevant now, isn’t it?”

He barely hears Hanneman’s protest. _My boy._ Like a snare trap, the words leave Hubert dangling. This is the other reason he avoided him: Hanneman must remember. When Hubert was young enough to be shoved into dresses, five at the oldest, Hanneman visited frequently to assist with research. He often stayed for dinner. The routine developed after Hubert’s mother disappeared, and—

Ah. Well. That’s one mystery solved.

The revelation doesn’t affect him. But he should be the one pouring tea right now, at just the temperature Ferdinand prefers. He doesn’t need to be a son to be a husband.

Before long, he stands with a little bow. “Thank you for the hospitality. You have given me much to think about.”

“Of course. You are welcome to drop by any time. Give my regards to Edelgard—and to Ferdinand. He mentioned you haven’t set a date for the wedding?”

Hubert makes a hasty retreat.

* * *

The moment Hubert confirms Edelgard is whole and well, her duties proceeding as planned, he casts Silence on the door and throws himself to his knees.

“I must beg your forgiveness, Lady Edelgard,” he says.

She appraises him from her new loveseat, her office’s only comfortable surface. “Who did you kill?”

He barks dryly. “Only your enemies.”

“Then who did you extort?”

“No one. Please, Your Majesty, this is a serious matter.”

She waits silently, her legs crossed, while he stares at her feet. As evenly as he can, he reports the Agarthan’s claim and his preliminary investigation, leaving out the actual events.

“Either I let a taunt pull me from your side this past day, or I failed to notice the very thing that brought you to harm,” he concludes. He can’t resist looking up. There is nothing sharp in her gaze, nor in anything but the lines of her uniform, and it distresses him more than if she had reached for her axe.

“When my so-called uncle accompanied me to the opera as a child, I was elated,” she says. “He’d been promising the outing for so long. If it was strange that he finally found the time, I didn’t care. He listened to me go on about Manuela’s performance on the whole carriage ride out of Enbarr.”

Hubert balls his fist by his knee. He shouldn’t have wasted a second investigating anything but how to remove that heathen from Edelgard’s life, permanently.

“Do you think I am to blame?” she asks.

“Of course not.”

“According to your logic, I should have anticipated his betrayal. Perhaps even prevented it.”

He drags his tongue against the roof of his mouth as if taste-testing for poison. “You acted based on the information available to you.”

“As did you. You have been my faithful aide and friend since the days nobody else could. I ask for nothing more.”

His knees grow numb against the marble. “The honor is mine.”

“Oh, Hubert. Formal as always.”

She touches his shoulder, as prim as a blade in a knighting ceremony, and bids him to rise.

* * *

Nobody but Hubert would see anything amiss in the bold way Ferdinand leads the council meeting. But he’s worn at the edges, and in spare moments he glances at Hubert, who can only nod at him until the meeting concludes. It takes little more than a touch to Ferdinand’s arm to direct him to their chambers. The walk there is achingly quiet, worse than if Ferdinand fussed or argued.

They don’t get much farther than the doorway. Ferdinand plants himself between Hubert and the coat rack, making Hubert stand in full regalia on the welcome mat Ferdinand had insisted upon. As if these chambers ever host guests.

“How are you feeling?” Ferdinand asks.

“Fine.” Before Hubert can return the question, Ferdinand tilts Hubert’s face down and presses a thumb beside one of his eyes. Hubert doesn’t need a mirror to know how shadowed it must be.

“No, you are not,” Ferdinand says. He lets go and crosses his arms. “Next time, simply ask me to sleep on the couch, rather than traveling to your estate while exhausted.”

“I had things to attend to.”  
  
Ferdinand brushes a bang away from his shoulder. “Were you not too disgusted to share my bed?”

Disgusted? Why would he assume—ah. Shit.

“Only with myself.”

Searching for words, he pulls Ferdinand into his arms. Ferdinand goes still. After a moment, he drops his head to Hubert’s shoulder.

“It seems I owe you an apology,” Hubert says. “I said and did a number of things that were uncalled for. You were not the cause of my discord.”  
  
“That is good to hear. I admit, I do not always know what to do when you stumble in like that, with no explanation.”

Hubert strokes Ferdinand’s hair. In only a day, he’d almost forgotten how soft it is, impossible to imitate even beneath his glove. “You needn’t do anything but remain yourself.”  
  
“Ah, but it is not in my nature to do nothing.”

Despite himself, Hubert smiles. “I am aware.”  
  
They separate to remove their outermost layers. The loveseat, which matches the one in Edelgard’s office, sinks enough beneath Hubert to remind him he’s barely rested. It’s unclear if he should thank or curse Dorothea for recommending the upholsterer.

Ferdinand places a hand on Hubert’s knee. “Last night was unusual. Will you at least tell me why?”

Hubert touches the ring that will bind his fiancé to House Vestra. After a point, ignorance is more dangerous than knowledge.

“I learned a theory about my family that shook many of my assumptions. Even about the implications of my own choices,” Hubert says.

“I see. Then would you have taken a different path, had you known?”

Falter in his support of Edelgard, and the elimination of her enemies, whatever form they took? “Never.”

“Then it is the same, in the end,” Ferdinand says, as simple as anything. Hubert brings his hand up to kiss the ring. Ferdinand isn’t wrong; no version of Hubert’s father would have accepted him into House Vestra. Does that not set Hubert apart?

“I decided long ago not to be mired in the past. To push forward with Lady Edelgard, and with you,” Hubert says.

“As we always will, of course. But do you not think all of this festered while it went unexamined?”

“Perhaps. I still need to investigate further. It’s only that…” He releases Ferdinand to grasp at nothing. “It isn’t proper to leave my fiancé here alone while I—”

“I shall join you, if you allow it.”

Hubert lets his arm settle. “Of course. It will be your estate, too, after all.”  
  
“Oh, good. I can finally replace those dreadful curtains!”

Ferdinand claps his hands, and whether Hubert should get annoyed or laugh, he does the latter.


End file.
